Vernacular Medicine and Modes of Knowing China

Within the broader contours of common knowledge and vernacular medicine, my MPIWG project explores “Embryology, Cosmology, Epistemology: Visual and Textual Depictions of the Fetus in and beyond Chinese Daily-Use Handbooks.” The project focuses on the illustrated section on “Sowing Seeds” or Gestation (zhongzi men 種子們), which was a standard feature of the genre of Comprehensive Compendia of Myriad Treasures (wanbao quanshu 萬寶全書) from its inception in the sixteenth century through the 1930s. It seeks to determine when and why the sequence of the “ten months of gestation,” which dates to ancient Chinese texts, was first illustrated. It probes how these images interacted with the surrounding text in the Myriad Treasures: from poetic portraits of the fetus to herbal prescriptions for the encumbered birth mother. It then places the set of illustrations that became codified in these daily-use materials in their broader global context: from possible early Indic influences, through later biomedical overwritings. Its granular focus is, however, on Edo Japan, where the exact set of images in the Chinese materials displaced an earlier sequence that represented the process of gestation as the incarnation of various stages of Buddhahood. Ultimately the project asks what this section on pregnancy taught its readers, viewers, and listeners about often competing notions of life, birth and rebirth, and of ritualized, medicalized, and gendered bodies in time and space.